Advertising on Instagram

The past decade has seen the online community of amateur photographers grow at an unprecedented rate, thanks in part to Instagram, which recently surpassed the 500 million user mark. It hardly came as a surprise when Instagram recently decided to capitalize on its phenomenal success by expanding its range of functions to appeal to advertisers and businesses.

In 2015, Instagram launched its advertising platform, which allows businesses to promote their goods and services using photos, videos, and carousel ads. This platform was further expanded in 2016 to include a new Instagram Business Profile with which companies can add further information and contact details for potential customers. With the help of sponsored posts, businesses can also expand the outreach of their posts and optimize their page further using the new statistics and analysis functions. But for those businesses who want to invest in advertising with the popular photo sharing platform, it’s crucial to get to grips with Instagram’s uses, characteristics, and quirks. This guide will reveal how to launch a successful and professional Instagram advertising campaign.

Instagram currently offers companies three different kinds of advertising formats:

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads

Instagram ads look almost the same as ordinary posts that appear organically in your feed. Users can, however, distinguish ads by the Instagram handle (the small, circular profile picture and the username), a call-to-action, the advertising text in the caption, and the ‘Sponsored’ icon, which appears at the top of the post. All Instagram advertising follows this same basic structure, but link destinations and CTAs (calls to action) are adapted to meet your objectives. Depending on your settings, which you should have already defined, the link either leads to your website, to the app store, or to a specified shop page.

Videos are another common form of advertising on Instagram. Since the beginning of 2016, private users have been able to upload 60 second-long videos to the platform, a feature that has been available for commercial users for some time now. This shows how quickly Instagram was able to keep up with and respond to growing demands from its user base. Video sharing on the platform grew by 40% in the 6 months before the introduction of longer videos.

Video ads stand out in particular thanks to moving images and sound; these features also enable companies to tell a more complex and detailed story than is possible with ordinary photographs. The food industry is an especially good example of a sector that has recognized the potential of video ads. The summer of 2016 saw a sudden trend for sharing attractive cooking videos, both on Facebook and Instagram. Videos from sites like Buzzfeed Tasty started going viral, racking up millions of clicks in just a few hours. This movement was quickly picked up by the advertising industry; quite noticeably, large food brands and supermarkets took advantage of the trend to advertise their products with short recipe clips.

‘What am I trying to achieve with this campaign?’ This simple question is one of the first and most important factors to consider before advertising on Instagram. Defining concrete goals from the outset is key to creating a successful Instagram ad campaign. The chosen advertising format is ultimately targeted towards an audience and should therefore be appropriate for its intended purpose.

If you have previously used Facebook advertising, getting to grips with Instagram ads should be relatively intuitive. Conceptually, Instagram advertising borrows heavily from Facebook – especially with regard to the goal-oriented approach. To create a new campaign, you must follow a specific goal from the outset. For Instagram ads, the ads manager offers the following goals:

• User interactions: On Instagram, two of the central forms of user interactions are likes (signified by a heart) and comments. Compared to other leading social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, the rate of user engagement is very high on Instagram.

• Brand awareness: Brand awareness can be very difficult to measure in concrete figures, however, the number of followers, posts, and reactions are helpful key figures that give a good indication of a brand’s popularity. Expanding your outreach is therefore key to increasing brand awareness.

• Website clicks: One attribute that is unique to Instagram is the fact that backlinks do not feature in the organic posts. While personal Instagram accounts can only link to a website in the short biography at the top of their profile, with a business profile, companies can create links in their Instagram ads, which can then be placed and monitored.

• App installations and interaction: Rather than link to a website, it’s also possible to use the call to action to link to an app store and use adverts to push app installations. It’s also possible to use this action to subsequently promote more activity in the app.

• Video plays: If your primary aim is to expand the outreach of your videos, you should select ‘video views’ as your campaign goal.

• Website conversions: Using a conversion tracking pixel, you can monitor purchases, downloads, and newsletter registrations on your website. The ad manager allows you to select increasing conversions as your campaign aim.

Not all of the Facebook target definitions are available for or relevant to Instagram advertising, including the targeting of particular groups to increase your follower count. On Facebook, it’s also possible to promote the entire page, rather than just individual posts, whereas Instagram lacks this option. For many, this is an important difference – though a deliberate decision by the developers. The fact that it is not possible to push a page simply by increasing your budget suits Instagram’s dynamic and personal characters, which saw the app grow to a powerful platform with a strong fan base. The Instagram community is under the general understanding that users find new accounts to follow by themselves, which is why the search function and the explore tab are available, and why hashtags are a key element. To build a large following, you need a combination of a strategic approach, appealing images, and the right hashtags. Of course, an effective ad campaign of any kind will also result in new followers.

After choosing your CTA button, the app will prompt you to define your desired target group.

Of course, with any form of advertising, careful planning and strategic execution is a key factor for success. Whether you’re using the Instagram ad manager or a more comprehensive Facebook tool, it’s unlikely that haphazard and random advertising will be fruitful. Businesses need to define specific targets in advance. Then, depending on your goals, you have to decide on the most appropriate kind of ad, if you will use the same campaigns for both Facebook and Instagram, and where to display your ads. You also need to decide where to set up the campaigns: in the app itself or through the Facebook web application.

Despite the fact that the options are quite limited, being able to promote posts on Instagram is of great significance for companies and brands. For your efforts to pay off, you just have to find the right strategy for your product. Your motive here is always of central importance. But in addition, every post, video, and of course every form of advertising should be highly communicative and visually appealing.

Promoting a post is advantageous in that if a post has already been proven to work, it can be pushed again. These successful posts can also be advertised with the Instagram ad manager to achieve maximum outreach. This will ensure that your ads resemble organic posts as closely as possible and are added seamlessly to the stream of user-generated content.